(Rhitu Chaterjee/ NPR Health Shots) — With COVID-19 cases still soaring across the U.S., it can be tempting to just ride the winter out on the couch, binging on Netflix. But psychologists say it’s important in 2021 for us all to keep up human contact.
“Isolation and particularly quarantines and lockdowns have been associated with increases in distress, depression, anxiety,” says Dana Rose Garfin, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine’s Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing.
Social isolation and loneliness, Garfin notes, are also associated with health problems such as coronary heart disease, stroke and even premature death.
“We don’t want to trade one risk for the other risk,” agrees Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a psychologist at Brigham Young University who studies isolation. “Ideally, what we want to do is find solutions that help reduce the overall risk” — of social isolation and of catching and spreading COVID-19.
But how to best do that? Get creative. (…)